


How Did You Get Here?

by Illusion_Of_Sea_Axes



Series: Nothing Like a Civil War [1]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Chorus (Red vs. Blue), Freeform, Gen, If Maine Lived, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Minor Character Death, Near Death Experiences, POV Second Person, Post Season 8, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, They are either nameless or pointless btw but they do get shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-02 11:52:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18810364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Illusion_Of_Sea_Axes/pseuds/Illusion_Of_Sea_Axes
Summary: You don't die on Sidewinder.You don't drown in your own suit and they don't fish you out like refuse thrown into the ocean.They pry you from the cliff side and save you.And then they lose you.





	1. Out of the Ice

You don’t die on Sidewinder.

 

They find you after logging the death of Agent Washington (you learn this second-hand), analyzing the crime scene, only for one to peer over the cliff edge and to see the hook of the Warthog buried into the ice cliff face and 450 kilograms of dying man hanging limply from the end.

 

Your memories of these moments are fuzzy at best on later review, but there is no way to forget the pure agony that was living through those injuries, left hanging there for eternity, waiting for death to come and save you.

 

Through the hot burning of your insides, the sharp painful contrast of the cold of Sidewinder nipping at the bloody wounds torn through suit and skin, hot and cold, _fucking pain,_ you keep breathing. You keep breathing ragged, wet heat, raking the tender insides of your windpipe and you can’t _stop_.

 

You HUD unhelpfully informs you that the suit’s systems are failing, you’re hung by the chest harness just above the surface of the freezing cold water, somehow still breathing through one lung with the other filling with blood. There are cuts, laying out the meat of your neck underneath the bodysuit.

 

They get one of their Pelicans over to you and pry you loose from the disconnected warthog tug and onto the Pelican. You recognize the sound, though all you can see are swimming shadows past your blood-misted visor.  

 

You spits up blood and gargle on it when it doesn’t come out, they start undoing parts of your armor and you only know this because the pressure vanishes. They yell over you but all you can hear is your heart stubbornly beating on, blood pumping in your ears even as you snarl and try to fight because you’re still full of adrenaline and the last time anyone touched you was to try and kill you-

 

A moment later there are several different hands sticking the points of something into the open wounds spilling your blood onto the vibrating Pelican floor- blood tray, fitting name-

 

and then your insides are being torched at the fucking stake of your pain-hollowed vertebrae.

 

You scream. You scream like any soldier being pumped full of hot, burning, acid dissolving through your guts- _biofoam._ It solidifies, cushioning your organs as comfortably as a cinderblock cushions your skull, and all you can do is gag on bile and blood.

Those moments on the Pelican are pure, nightmare-fuel agony. Your bodysuit is tight and sticky, a second, smaller skin that compresses you, strangles you where it remains at your throat,

 

but it’s the only thing fucking holding you together while every scar and bone aches like new.

 

You can recall dying, distantly, and that is what somehow manages to trigger the flood of memory-laced agony to fill your head, the hollow space burned out at the back of your skull-

 

_“NO!” She screams, voice humming through your COMfreq right as the Innie knocks you to the truck bed and unclips his magnum. A blink and he empties the entire magazine into your throat and the world flashes red and white and your HUD screams-_

 

You don’t remember if you blacked out or if you were conscious the whole Pelican trip to the ship. You only know the memory ends as they strapped you to a gurney.

 

But that wasn’t where the pain ended.

  
  


You coming to consciousness after losing it is like a frigate crashing into a sleepy outer colony town, like a punch to the face from a person you didn’t know you were looking at, suddenly being dropped from a pitch black void into the most occupied mag rail station on Earth in the middle of the day.  

 

The darkness (it is darkness. It is not screaming it is not flashing lights it is not everything and nothing hitting you at once and spilling out of your mangled vocal chords onto the floor of Command, it is darkness) is suddenly bright white lights and a skeleton set on fire.

 

It is a man’s corpse coming to life on a med table screaming.

 

You’re armorless and you feel naked, naked and scared and in fucking _pain_. You jerk, screech at the nearest person, hidden, faceless, behind a reflective medic visor-

 

Your face stares back at you, stretched over the half-dome shape of the visor, blood caked into his hair and his eyes wild and bloodshot and caught in some kind of startled battle with you, you-

 

You’re restrained. No matter how hard you thrash your arms, kick your legs, no matter how hard-

 

You don’t have your armor, the strength mods, you are a man on a table, a man strapped to a table surrounded by people you don’t know,

You are _helpless_.

 

You’re still stuffed full of the acid-sensation of biofoam meant to keep your insides where they’re designed to be, but in the moment, all you know is pain. All you can do is scream and thrash as reactionary tears burn at your eyes while you snap, _fight_ . You’ve been fighting for years, you can’t stop _now._

 

You wants to fight, punch, _kill_ what’s hurting hurting you, crush the ribs of it and break its hand and stab a knife into the skull, into the motor control center, blood’s coming up your throat-

 

They put you under again.

  
  


When you come up again, they’ve put you in full restraints. Your insides feel raw and mixed around and weird. They don’t tell you anything, the techs that come in and go out quickly, blurring once they’re just a few feet away. The world is a white blur around you. The doctors and techs don’t look you in the face, so you just remain there, unable to do anything except croak, stripped of your bodysuit and dressed in hospital scrubs, covered in bandages. They don’t intend to deploy you again.

 

There’s still blood under your fingernails, clinging to your teeth, caught in the length of hair left to grow over time. Every breath you take is raw, every swallow is copper in taste and you might be dying. The hollowed out, shredded creature cornered in the back of your skull whines “i hope I am.”

 

You aren’t.  

 

You spend your time in and out of consciousness during those early days, in and out of pain, in and out of nightmares. These nightmares muddle the scraps of memories, mixing and gluing them together for any kind of sense of what _happened_ to you. You burned, you fell, you died, you carried on, you killed so many of them, you knew them, you killed them, killed _her_ -

 

They give you a keyboard when you’ve recovered enough to think coherently and be left off of drugs for more than a few hours.

 

“Hello,” the tech greets, standing to your side. “I’m going to ask you some questions and I want you to type out your answer. Okay?” All you can do is nod. “Let’s start easy. What year is it?”  

 

“2552,” you tap out slowly, a quiver working its way through your bones. The tech is quiet for a moment before answering.

 

“It’s 2554.” The tech corrects. “What were you doing on Sidewinder?” That is an even harder question to answer, though. The answer is warbled, different answers mixing together behind some kind of fog.

 

“Search and retrieve.“ You hesitantly type out. “We were searching.”

 

“We?”

 

You and...You and Washington. Agent Washington, you were going to kill him, did you kill him, what- Your hands start to shake, tremors snaking out into the bones of your fingers.

 

“Washington.”

 

“Do you know what happened to Agent Washington?”

 

“Dead?” Blood in the snow, blood on gray and yellow, burnt and morphed plating, _I knew you would do this Meta I just can’t believe-_

 

“Yes.” The tech brushed that off, as if his words didn’t just open up a black hole in your gut. “Do you know your name?”

 

“Meta.” The word feels weird to type out. You don’t know if your name is Meta. A smooth voice, calming, a warm presence- _“We are the Meta,”_ echoes like a ghost in an empty room.  

 

“No.” The technician corrects, as if he knows, as if he fucking knows _anything_. “Your name is Maine.” It summons images of Earth to mind. “Do you know who gave you that name?”

 

That lights up pathways in your brain like a firestorm. Like a piece of shrapnel to the gut. The image of a graying man- it lights up every bone in your body with pure fucking _rage_ and vertigo purple burns the back of your throat.  

 

The datapad shatters into pieces of plastic and glass against the wall behind the technician.

 

There are a few more appointments following that one, though, where they send in a tech (a different one every time) with a data-pad.

 

“All I want you to do is nod if you recognize what I show you. Shrug if you aren’t sure.” She asks, this one a woman with black hair tucked into a bun, holding up the data-pad as it projects a holograph in front of you.

 

The UNSC logo, nod, Harvest, shrug, a Paris-class frigate, nod, a Covenant cruiser, nod, a glassed planet, nod, Helljumpers, nod, Carolina-

 

_“Don’t be a baby.”_

 

No, it isn’t Carolina. It’s armor, a holograph of her armor, not Carolina, not Carolina- Carolina’s not alive- Carolina is dead- They killed her-you killed her- _no-_

 

The appointment ends there. They run you through some light physical therapy the next day. Run you through a small course at your own pace under the watchful gaze of the barrels of UNSC standard rifles, do some jumps, test how hard you can hit a mat. It lasts about two hours before they put you back in your cell and sedate you.  

 

They’re testing you. You figure it out in the dark of night, they’re testing you and your memory. Testing to see what you know, what you can do, because you know something, you _know_. You’re not sure what.

 

Your next memory appointment, you try and pretend you don’t know anything they show you. Vehemently shake your head. Shake your head like a wet dog, like a voiceless man, whatever, just don’t admit you know-

 

Bjordinal Cryogenics, Insurrectionists, Spiral, Dr. Sebiel Rhee (you killed him, you killed him on Spiral), Agent Connecticut, the Dakotas- _“It’s not like Maine has much to say, anyway_ -”

 

No matter how much your throat aches, how much your mouth tastes like copper, you do not admit to knowing what these are.

 

Maine fits you better than Meta, you suppose at some point when you should be asleep.

 

 _Meta_ , you mouth, though you can’t say it. Meta feels like an empty room, an empty room that echoes back every breath and every blink in voided sensation, a ship venting all her atmosphere at once through a tear in the back of the skull.

  
  


No one explains anything to you. They don’t explain why your brain is submerged in fog (you blame the drugs) or why you look like such a mess in the reflective surface of their medical visors.

 

Your memories are broken, jagged edged things you can’t pick up without lighting up a line of pain through some part of your brain, lighting up scar tissues like fresh wounds so hard it burns. So you don’t. Or at least, you try. Left alone in a room full of broken glass, you’re bound to step in some of it.   

 

Everything is broken and fucked up and alone in a weird kind of way you don’t quite get.  

 

Names comes and go, perspectives distorted, not like map distortion but like ‘am I screaming or are you screaming’ distortion. The one thing that comes, repeated back like someone recorded voice over voice on the same piece of twentieth century tech, overlapping until all you can hear is the distorted cacophony, is that you are a _weapon_.

 

A weapon, a dog, a monster, all the same thing.

 

Used to destroy, destroyed, used, it makes you ache along the scarring of your spine.  

 

You were stuck in recovery for a while. Time runs from you and loops around and you just let it because eventually the pain is replaced by a static hollow at the core of your thoughts.

 

It’s once you’re recovered enough to be cuffed and walked that your time in recovery, in the nameless white space of nameless doctors, is over. You’re dressed in an orange jumpsuit and traded over to a pair of UNSC soldiers who bring you to a room and leave you there, cuffed at the wrists.

 

You don’t have a datapad, or any way to ask where you’re going. You can only guess you’re heading, maybe, for where you’ll get a trial as a war criminal. That is technically what you are, right?

 

Either way, as you step into what is clearly an improved cell and the door slides shut behind you, you are not returning to Sidewinder.

 

You sleep. Sleeping sitting up is not unfamiliar to you, so you sleep.

 

And the ship crashes.

 


	2. Into the Fire

 

Sleep is sporadic. You’ve been off the drugs only for a few days, left to your natural sleep cycle, and the nightmares that seemed to come quicker than you liked them to. You spend your waking moments (a few hours at most) wondering what will become of you when the ship lands, wherever that may be. You assume Earth. 

 

Maybe they’ll flush you out of an airlock on the trip. You calculate how fast it would take for you to die, how quick the vacuum of space could kill a Spartan, as you sit in a room used as containment for you. You could survive for maybe thirty seconds in just your large orange jumpsuit. Maybe longer. That was never part of your testing when they took you off the ice.

 

It’s while you’re fading into another doze when the ship starts to shake.

 

At first, you think you imagined it, but then the vibrations travelling through the floor sink into your boots, through your toes. It’s the only warning before the alarms  start spewing from the ship’s systems. You have the thought to stand up, right as the gravity suddenly shifts.

 

The gravity shifts and your own weight and sudden imbalance drags you down, hard, against the wall. Your head glances off the bulkhead, splashing stars across your vision while you try to get your cuffed hands where they can keep you upright, fumbling.

 

The gravity shifts again, and again, and again- your body tenses up as you experience freefall inside a cell, thrown about your cell as the entire world becomes a shaking, screaming jumble of red lights and klaxons and metal. You flail, you kick and try to hit your cuffs against the surfaces gravity flings you towards instead of-

 

The world lights up white through the front of your skull, curling into the roots of your teeth and the nerves of your eyes like a needle to the cornea, and blood spurts from your nose, red under red light that blurs when you squint your eyes past the shocks of white-hot pain coursing through every inch of bone composing your skull. 

 

There’s the distant bangs of explosive decompression that are followed by your ears popping as the ship breaches atmosphere. The gravity settles, throwing you like a 130 kilogram ragdoll against the nearest bulkhead. 

 

Your head cracks against the bulkhead and the world flicks out like someone hit a lightswitch in a windowless room. 

 

The ship jerks like a wild horse and then, thrown like the rider, it crashes.

 

You wake up to hurt. Your entire skull feels like someone took a sledgehammer to the front of it and like your brain has been so viciously liquified it may be what is slowly oozing out of your nose. 

 

Your eyes burn like dry kindling. Past the vague ringing in your ears, there’s the screaming of alarms. Every bone in your skeletal system aches, the very marrow feeling as though it had been replaced by lead.

 

“Get up, soldier!” 

 

Blink through the swimming, blurred filter that seems to have fitted itself over your vision. You slowly drag your arms from underneath yourself and push yourself up. You can still do that, even as you’re cuffed, as all the fluids in your body shift with gravity, weighing you down towards the bulkhead, cold and hard, not at all welcoming but better than trying to move.

 

Slowly you roll out your spine, sitting up. The world liquefies and spins in front of your squinting eyes, ignorant of the throbbing in the side of your skull, before solidifying again, vaguely sideways. You blink, vision blurring and clearing in the span of a few seconds. The world remains tilted sideways.

 

Your next course of action is to fit one of your knees up against your gut and push yourself upright, though the world warps like it’s stretched over a dome underneath you, pulling the area into curves around you. 

 

The wall is there, metallic cold and soothing against your skull, even though you can feel the vibrations of distant alarms.

 

The door is open. Sort of. Something must have gone wrong with the mechanisms, because it’s opened the size of your head and stuck that way. 

Your gait is imbalanced and stumbling, your eyes feeding incorrect distances to your brain, leaving you to stumble over your own feet.

 

You thunk against the wedged door and the wall, head dangling in the gap. It could reactivate and squash your skull right there. It doesn’t. The air you suck in smells of smoke and blood and metal and death. For a moment, you suspect you smell dirt. But you don’t. There is no dirt here. 

 

You wedge your cuffed hands into the gap and shove. 

 

The door squeals, the sound resounding through your skull like an empty stadium, as you push and push, your vision whiting at the edges, until you can squeeze through the gap. It scrapes at your orange jumpsuit and your thick cuffs get shoved up against your chest as you push past. 

 

You stagger when you make it to the other side, pressing your hands to the door to steady yourself.

 

One of your cell guards is crumpled against the bulkhead across the corridor, a vibrant red smear leading down the bulkhead to where he laid, head cracked against the metal.

 

When you reach him, you can see the movement of his chest and the rasping of his breathing. The other guard appears absent, no matter which direction of the hall you look, you can’t see him or any smudge of blood that implies where he went.

 

The lights flicker on the puddle of blood, off the glint of the holstered pistol. You don’t take it. You walk away. 

 

That seems familiar. 

 

You walk along the wall, squinting past the flickering lights and the pain working its way from the knot at the base of your cranium through every nerve and square inch of brain tissue contained within your skull.

 

The air starts to get hotter, though you don’t hear any crackle of fire, so you keep going, past prone staff. You don’t check if they’re alive. You only wonder why there are so few of them.  

 

Your steps start to become more imbalanced, your body leaning to the side, your vision warping still like the world is being stretched onto the surface of a bowl. 

You don’t know where you’re going on this ship, the hallway is tilting downwards into a weird slope, the metal panels of the floor creaking at their unnatural curving. You step carefully, trying to keep from sliding down the gradual slope.  

 

The air is warm and smells of blood and burnt meat and metal.  

 

A wide gash, heat-morphed metal plating torn up and exposing ship internals, is what waits at the bottom. A jagged rock outcropping a few yards thick, blackened from the heat, is stuck up through the gap, pushing into one of the bulkheads.

 

Wires spark underneath the torn paneling and there’s a body, snagged by the rib cage on a sharp, peeled back plate. 

 

Ignore the body. Ignore the face of horror and terror.

 

It reeks of burning man and kevlar and plastic. 

 

Carefully step around the zone of blood sticking to the metal until there’s a clean space to grab onto that won’t cut into your palms and awkwardly vault yourself over the edge, boots meeting the rock that tore through the metal plating.

 

Metal and rock snags on your jumpsuit as you slide down, trying your best not to roll down the rest of the way and fuck up your insides more than they’ve already been in the past few months.

 

At the bottom, the dirt is splattered in blood from the soldier above and his fucked up comrades scattered around the rock. 

 

Check if they’re alive, Maine. Feel nothing when they aren’t. 

 

The ship hangs over you, creaking as the metal continues to try and settle, and the crackling of distant fires consuming whatever they can inside. The only light in this tiny little cave formed from rocks wedged underneath the ship is the sunlight dripping through the gaps. 

 

They’d pulled up at the last second, is what you assume from how the ship landed, and you stumble through the first gap in the surrounding rocks big enough to walk through. It forms a narrow tunnel, rocks scraping skin through your jumpsuit, tearing against the jagged granite texture where your shoulders brushed up.

 

The ground is lumpy under you, a long streak of red through the dry dirt ahead. You keep going.  

 

The tunnel opens into a bright opening, ringed by rocks and more ship debris. There’s a body splayed out on the ground a few feet ahead of you.

 

Stare at him. Stare at the soldier whose visor has partially fused to his face and his leg is ruined, warped and burned and torn within the fatigues underneath, so you can see the bright pink tone of bone through all the mess. He stares at you, you wonder how he got so far, looking the way he does.

 

“Help… Help me...” He coughs up a concerning amount of blood, bubbles forming at the corners of his mouth. 

 

His hair is gut-turningly blonde.

 

That is what gets you to stoop down and reach out, to touch him and wince when he cries out and his body spasms in a pain response. He notices the orange jumpsuit, stares straight up into your eyes. You stare back into the one you can see, note how it is bloodshot and the iris is green, not some weird hazel blue, and some part of you is relieved and another is angry. 

 

You look for his IFAK and carefully unhook it from his hip. Biofoam can’t fix this. If you find the rest of the crew, you’ll be locked up again. You can hope the rest of the crew find him as you try to figure out how the hell you’re supposed to fix this man. 

 

Stop and wonder why you even want to. 

 

You grab a tube of medgel, you don’t entirely know what you’re gonna do with it, there’s not enough in the small tube for the burns and the way his leg is, he’ll be lucky if he can ever use it again. 

 

The dying soldier’s head suddenly bursts open. In time with the snap of a gunshot, grey matter and bone fragments explodes outward from a point in his scalp, and you fall backwards, arms unable to support you. 

 

You have enough sense to duck out of range of whatever it is shooting you because you’re scared and a Freelancer, a deadly fucking combination. The IFAK skids through the dirt as you quickly push yourself into the shadow of the rock outcroppings to get out of view and drop onto your stomach.

 

Sniper. It has to be a sniper. Where are you? Whose shooting at you?         

 

Lay there, for a heart-thundering moment, and wait. Wait and ignore the loss of feeling in your fingertips, wait. You’ve waited, mute, unmoving, for longer than this while staring down an uncertain enemy before. 

 

You lay there for about ten minutes, Maine, before a man walks into view, holding a battle rifle. Not a sniper. So at least two hostiles.

 

He isn’t wearing UNSC standard, there is no UNSC tag on his pauldrons, but he’s human, and that is a big difference than the Covenant bastards you’ve stood against. He kicks the soldier in the ribs with his boot, as if he could have possibly survived that bullet to the skull, and whistles.

 

“You got  _ fucked up _ .” He turns to analyze the rest of the setting. He spots you, Maine, but he doesn’t shoot you. He might not realize you’re not dead. He walks over, slow. “Holy shit,” he mutters. You hold your breath. “No way.”

 

His voice is muffled as he speaks into a radio, but you can hear it. “Shit, man, get the fuck over here. I think I found something fucking amazing.” He nudges your ribs with the toe of his boot, prods you with the muzzle of his gun, right into the fresh energy scars where the sim trooper in Carolina’s colors impaled you with his human-sized energy sword. It’s messier than the scarring across your face. You suppose the medics didn’t care as much now as those other ones did before. “I think he passed out.” 

 

Don’t move, hold your breath. You can do that for a while. 

 

“Yeah, it’s a huge guy, orange jumpsuit-” he prods your spine, lighting up the memories of the keloid line of your spine. “Like, real big.  _ Spartan  _ big. He’s got some fancy tech, too-” he prods you in the back of the skull, the implant site, the hollow place in the back of your skull burned out by the voices that just wanted to be  _ whole _ \- 

 

Jerk, spasm like an electrocuted man and spin around onto your back, startling the man enough to hook your cuffed hands onto his rifle. Turn into your pull, the man’s helmet clattering against your shoulder hard enough to jar teeth in skull. 

 

_ “You punch like a fucking train, man.” _ Echoes like the ring of struck tuning fork in your brain. It spawns that sparking, purple sensation in your gut, the taste burning at your the back of your throat-

 

The man drives his armored elbow into your face, a jarring momentum in your face that sends a painful jagged line through your cheekbone and into your jaw. 

 

You spin around onto your feet, wrenching the battle rifle far from the man’s hands as you can as you stumble away, the world swimming and liquefying before your eyes. The distant alarms are ringing in your skull again, echoing, but you don’t fall down. 

You fumble for a moment, trying to handle the rifle well enough to fill the man full of his own bullets before he can push himself out of a faceplant and spin around to face you. You get the point of your pointer on the trigger as the man takes the first steps of a charge at you as you take a long step back and fire.

 

The gun recoils in your hands and most of the bullets kick up dirt. One bout, however, bury themselves into the tendons where thigh meets hip and groin, spraying fresh blood into the dust underfoot.

 

He slides into the dirt, slumped over, and he screams; “Ah, you  _ bitch! _ ” He rolls upright again, fumbling for something at the small of his back-

 

You throw his battle rifle at him. Well, fling it, more accurately, but either way it smacks against his chest plate and you charge at him.

 

“-shit!”

 

Your shoulder meets solid metal and the impact punches through your skeleton from shoulder to teeth, but your own momentum sends the man sprawling to the ground underneath your stumbled weight.

 

Dig your elbow up into the man’s throat, pressing your weight down. 

 

A flailing arm smacks against your skull, a vibration that sends a wave of nausea through your system. You push yourself up with your feet, digging the angle of your bent arm further into his throat.

 

Rise up, digging a knee into the fresh bullet wounds, the man’s blood seeping through the jumpsuit to your skin. He screams through his helmet, bucking, thrashing, but he can’t get you off. Shift, quickly, and fit your hands in an awkward formation to the man’s throat.

 

Feel the muscles work under the bodysuit as you lay your weight down on him, 200 pounds of rage on a normal human throat. He thrashes, fights, but you don’t let go. He’ll kill you if you do.

 

Feel the structure of his trachea collapse under your grip and feel his last breath hiss out of him as his arms drop limply to the ground. 

 

Don’t let go of that corpse, Maine. Stare at it. 

 

Consider taking off his helmet, shakily undo the helmet seal. Decide not to take it off. Leave the man faceless. 

 

_ “Mack? Mack? Mack! Answer you goddamn radio! What were you saying?” _

 

A pause. Analyze the man you’ve just killed, note with confidence there is no UNSC insignia on his armor. You can only hope you didn’t just crash on an insurrectionist planet. You don’t know how many of those there still are, and his armor sure as hell seems rather good quality for an insurrectionist. Think of a woman in EOD configuration armor, think of her and how there is some part of you that aches at the memory of her even though you can’t place her name-  _ Connie _ .

 

Forget how the fluids of your body slosh and burn as you jerk upright. Ignore the way the world warps once again like you’re a hamster inside a reflective sphere. Forget fucking everything, the man you just killed, the man you watched die, just  _ run _ . 

 

You’re familiar with running, Maine. Your memories are fuzzy and fractured, but there is a familiarity in your boots pounding terrain as you run from the corpses of armored men.

 

You’re not familiar with the very clear lack of armor to try and weigh you down.  

 

Shots go off, taking out rocks and dirt at your feet, and someone screams after you. One shot, spaced about by a long second by another, then another- sniper. Then there’s the rattle of an automatic weapon that sprays up dust- there’s more.  

 

Your head spins and swims with the dips of the terrain, the rocky land of wherever-the-fuck-you-are. There are other ships here. Other wreckages, burned out shells gouged by what you can only guess was AA weaponry and that could place you fucking anywhere cause even fucking Harvest had something they could use as AA. 

 

Dive behind an older corvette, its nose buried straight into the earth, the back half completely torn from the body and nowhere to be seen. Hope none of them saw you, catch your breath. 

 

Bullets pepper your cover, but you don’t hear them over your breathing and your heartbeat, you feel the vibration in your fingertips.

 

Your bones are lead, weighing you down to the earth, gravity ever pressing on your skull and dragging on the liquid weight of you. You can’t stop for long, or you’ll never keep going. You’ll collapse onto the earth and fade into death and, right now, in this moment, adrenaline is begging you to keep going. 

 

And so you do. 

 

Run past the ship wreckage and trip into a trench dug by some ship you don’t take the time to look for. Grains of dirt cling to the fresh blood on your jumpsuit. Crawl out of that trench on your hands and knees, scrabbling against the rough texture of the sandy dirt until you’re over the end. Another bullet finds a home in the dirt to the right of your head, spraying dirt into your face. Get out of the trench and keep running, don’t stop. They haven’t stopped shooting at you, they don’t stop shooting at you even once you break past the tree line at a stumbled Spartan’s pace, which is still pretty goddamn fast.

 

Imagine the thundering footsteps of your brothers and sisters at arms, charging into the jungle fringe with you. It keeps you going to the point you don’t even realize the gunfire has stopped. 

 

But you keep running. Run and run and run for as long as you can, adrenaline burning fires through the old familiar pathways in your body.

 

Run. Your heart thumps, thumps hard in your chest, as you run, like a commandeered turret turned on the enemy. 

 

Keep running, Maine. 

 

Keep running til every step is jagged pain through the bones of your legs, the bite of lactic acid at your muscles, and every breath is scraping the insides of your lungs bloody raw and you can barely keep on your feet as you leap and navigate past all the goddamn vegetation. 

 

You slip and fall face-first into a hollow in the earth, Agent Maine. You land at the bottom of a hollow and lay there, face-down in the mud and foliage decay, as your muscles finally give out on you. You burn, your body  _ burns _ , but you  _ can’t  _ go any farther. 

 

They’re not gonna stop chasing you.

 

You can’t wait for them to find you.

 

You have to keep moving. 

 

You blackout in the bottom of a hollow for minutes, or maybe an hour, you don’t know because you don’t have a HUD or the clock that accompanies it. 

 

All you can do is try and guess how far you’ve gotten. 

 

Draw up the energy to roll onto your back and stare up, blankly, at the gaps in the tree canopy. Take a moment to breath and stare up at the sky, even as everything blurs halfway up the tree trunks. It’s sometime in the day, afternoon maybe. You don’t know this planet’s time cycle. 

 

You keep breathing, even as you ache on the inside. Note you need to find water. And food. But first, water, because even a Spartan can’t last long without water. 

 

First, you have to get out of this hole. 

 

So you crawl out. The big, scary man that had been the bane of Project Freelancer- crawling like a dying animal out of the hole you were maybe supposed to die in, and moving on. 

 

Get back on your feet. 

 

Keep moving. 

 

You’re a soldier, built for this (maybe not this specifically), so do what you were built to do, soldier, and keep walking. 

 

You don’t know how far you’ve gone, you really don’t. You must get far, though, because the sky begins to darken and the hostiles from the crash site have yet to notify you that they’ve caught up.

 

The only sounds are the ambient wildlife, muffled to your ears like they’re playing through a wall, but nothing dangerous has hunted you down and sniffed out the mix of UNSC and Spartan and hostile blood on your jumpsuit.

 

You take that as luck. You haven't had much of that.

 

The air is cooling, quickly, now that the sun was no longer overhead. You’ll freeze to death if you don’t find someplace to light a fire. Your jumpsuit wasn’t designed for wandering around in some jungle- you pause on the edge of a muddy road. You’ve been on enough outer colonies to recognize a road, even in the middle of the jungle where it could go ignored on first glance.

 

Then you notice the sound. 

 

The ambient noises of the night have been interrupted by a distant rumbling. Not the kind of world-ending, volcano rumbling, but-

 

“Shut up, Corporal.”

 

Voices.

 

“Why? Literally no one is gonna hear me over the sound of this dumbass jeep! What’s the point of being quiet?”

 

“I’ll be less likely to throw you in the mud and have you walk the rest of the way to base, how about that for difference?”

 

“Hey, up yours- AH!! I-I mean yes sir! Sorry, sir!” A high pitched squeal punctuated the apology.

 

“That’s what I thought.”

 

A car- warthog. An old, battered, noisy warthog that rumbles like a distant explosion is driving ahead. The headlights cut through the foliage, lighting up the greens and other vibrant jungle colors in the twilight.

 

You duck behind the trunk of a thick tree, sucking in a breath and exhaling as quietly and slowly as you can, even though they likely couldn’t hear you over their noise-maker of a vehicle.

Except the warthog draws to a stop, rumbling ominously just a few yards away from you. 

 

“Did you see that?”

 

“Corporal, I swear to god-!”

 

“No, I swear, I saw someone. Felix, you’ve got thermals or whatever, right?”  

 

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll check for the big scary monster.” Hold your breath, don’t move, don’t move, don’t move. You hear the smack of boots on mud and whoever this Felix is, you’re pretty sure he’s walking a lazy circle around the warthog.

 

“It could be a Fed scout!”

 

“Pretty sure you’d be dead if it was a Fed scout.” Not Felix, or what you presume is the driver. “Also, they’re like on the other side of the fuckin’ continent, I don’t think they’re gonna be sending patrols all the way out here.” 

 

“Hellooo, scary jungle monster, come out, come out wherever you are~”

 

“You don’t have to be a jackass, Felix.”

 

Hold your breath, Maine. Stay as fucking still as you can stay because if he sees you, whoever he is, he will probably shoot you and you are not going to fucking die to this asshole-

 

“I really don’t-” He peers, mockingly, around the tree and that’s when you see him and he sees you. Orange and black, angular helmet, very much  _ not  _ UNSC standard- “WHAT-”

 

Duck. Duck and roll to your open side before the man can bring his rifle to bear and then charge at him. He has the quick thinking to leap to the side, leaving you to stagger onto the road-

 

“What the fuck!?”

 

“Shit- SHIT!” 

 

Your legs buckle under you and your knees meet mud, followed by the rest of your front. Roll, roll-  _ fucking roll _ \- push yourself upright only to nearly trip on the mud as the man opens fire.

 

The gunshot echoes in the emptiness of the jungle, in your skull. A resounding snap of sound, the bullets digging into a tree somewhere.

 

Snarl. Snarl at Felix and his friends, partners, whatever- and that catches Felix off guard just a moment.

  
“What the fuck?” He says, finally, gun now pointing in the general direction of your knees.

 

Try and stand at your full 6-something feet of height and stare. Felix is smaller than you. He must be gawking at you behind his tiny visor because he mutters; “no fuckin’ way.”  

 

There’s the clunky sound of something rotating and when you turn to look at the warthog, the turret is pointed right at you by someone in weird armor that doesn’t really look UNSC at all. You can't dodge the turret. Not long enough to get away, anyhow.

 

“Who the fuck’re you?” The gunner asks.

 

Growl again, that animal noise, the only noise you can really make. 

 

“Are you fuckin’ stupid or something? Answer the question!” The soldier shakes the turret for emphasis. You can’t answer, so you glare at him. 

 

“Dude, he looks like a prisoner.” The driver points out, leaning out the side of the warthog to stare at you, silhouetted by the headlights. “A really fucked up prisoner.” 

 

“Prisoner of who, though?” The UNSC logo must be on your jumpsuit, somewhere. Your legs still ache. 

 

“Does it matter?”  

“Guys, we gotta take him to Hine.” Felix finally says.

 

“What, why?”

 

“Well, mainly, cause she’ll have our asses if we leave this guy to run around til the birds eat him, and also he could be useful… Pretty fuckin’ useful.” 

 

Take a step back. You’re not gonna get used again. No one is fucking using you again. Purple, taste that shitty angry purple again and start walking backwards.

 

“Hey- hey, where the fuck are you going?”

 

Growl again, keep going- get the fuck away, get away, whoever Hine is, whoever Felix is, whoever these fuckers are, you won’t let them use you-

 

You trip on a fern, one of the weird stringy ferns that seem native to this planet, and you fall backwards. 

 

Your skull meets something solid and darkness snaps over you once again.

  
  
  


Coming to consciousness this time is less like flicking a switch and more like slowly opening the blinds. The world blurs, refusing to solidify for a half-conscious ex-marine, though you can hear the voices and sounds around you. 

 

_ “Hello, Agent Maine-” _

 

Your body jerks, and the first thing you comprehend is you are flat on your back- 

 

hands press down on your shoulders. 

 

You thrash, instincts kicking in before actual thought, rolling sideways off the slab you’d been laid out on. Your shoulder meets ground- a resounding metal thunk that vibrates through you like a tuning fork. 

 

“-Shit!”

 

“Hey, hey, easy there-!” 

 

The world is blurring colors and shadows. Your hands flail, catching on the grainy, cold gray. The shadows lurch and shift at the corners, hands cup around your arm, rough through the orange jumpsuit.

 

Lash out with your elbow, blindly, for whoever is  _ fucking _ touching you-

 

“Hey-!” They catch your elbow in their hand- it barely fits in their hand, it would hardly count as catching- “Calm down! Calm!”

 

The muscles in your stomach coil and bile burns at the back of your throat. Your head lolls to the side and your throat works against the knot formed in your throat under the many bullet hole scars. “Hey, Hey, buddy-”

 

_ “Buddy-” _

 

“You’re safe.  _ Safe _ , okay?” 

 

Your eyes burn and you plant your hands (still cuffed) against the cold gray. You suck in a breath, choke on it as you squeeze your eyes shut. 

 

“Breathe. Okay? Just breathe.” 

 

The instructions are stupid simple, should be easy, but your lungs feel like they’ve been compressed to the thickness of your fingernails and refuse to re-inflate. 

 

Blood, pulsing from your throat, through your bodysuit- you can’t  _ breathe, can’t breathe, can’t _ -

 

An ungloved hand rests against the back of your neck, body heat unfamiliar against your skin. The medics always touched you with gloved hands. You can feel the callouses, rough and  _ real _ . Strands of your hair, trapped under the grip, but it barely registers. 

 

_ Carolina, grinning, a split across her temple coating her face the same shade as her hair “you did good-”  _

 

“Breathe. Breathe, alright?” 

 

It all comes rushing in like painful claws down the flesh in your throat, but it fills your lungs like euphoria and you gasp a little bit, sucking in more air and then letting it out in a shaky exhale. 

 

“There we go.” The hand drifts, flattens against the skin above where the base of your cervical vertebrae, warmth seeping into your shaking bones. “You’re safe.”

 

You remain that way for about sixty seconds before other voices start verging, like exhaustion pulling at the ends of your vision. The voice -a woman, you assume- hissed a command to ‘shut up’ at the sources. 

 

Another sixty seconds, before the woman finally asks. “You good?” 

 

You open your eyes, slowly. The colors slowly solidify, the cold gray you’d been flailing at resolving into metal plating, dented and scratched, rust encroaching onto the surface from multiple points. 

 

Slowly, you turn to look at the woman beside you. Her face was young, black, and her hair was pulled back from her face in tight braids. Her eyes, vibrant and blue. Gene-flipped. 

 

“Good?” She repeats, slowly. “I- sorry, do you understand me?” When you don’t immediately answer, she repeats the question in what could be Portuguese or maybe Swahili. You don’t know either. “English?” She asks when you blink at her.

 

Nod your head.  

 

The woman is armored. She’s armored, her other hand that isn’t on you is gloved, clutching the glove you realize must belong to the hand on you. 

 

“You took a hit to the head,” she states, though you already know this. You push down the embarrassment of knocking yourself out on a tree into the deepest pit of your stomach. “The patrol brought you back to base.”   

 

Your gaze shifts away from the woman, taking in the rest of your surroundings. A rusted metal structure, old paint signalling exits and maybe what this place was supposed to be. A table, welded from what may have been parts of a storage crate, is in the middle of the room. 

 

You guess this is an exam room based on the tray of tools crammed next to a handful of med supplies, and the lack of anything else. A lone emergency light hands over the table, concentrated onto the table by a tin cap.  Standing on the other side of the room is a cluster of soldiers, firearms in hand. 

 

These soldiers are not like the man you strangled at the crash site. Their armor is patched, bits and pieces from other sets assembled onto them with little craftsmanship, the painting chipped and worn. They lack a UNSC tag. You recognize the outdated model of rifles they carry. Except one. He carries a type of pistol you’ve never seen before but does vaguely resemble a Magnum. 

 

“What’s your name?” The medic (you assume she’s a medic. Her armor has two sloppy red cross tags on the pauldrons. She appears unarmed. “Can you tell me your name? Do you remember it?”

 

You tap the scarring of your throat, jut out your chin so she can get a glance at it. Growl what would’ve once been words to emphasize, in case she didn’t get it. 

 

“You can’t talk?”

 

You shake your head. 

 

“Okay, we can work around that. Can you stand?” She holds onto your elbow, as if she would be able to stabilize you if you did fall, and rising up from where she had been crouching alongside you. You rise with her, placing one hand on the table and sucking in a breath.

 

“Let me grab a data pad. Can you type? Read?”

The growling noise you make seems to convey ‘yes’ to the woman, since she walks over to a battered desk to pick up an equally battered datapad. She turns it on, handing the flickering thing to you.

 

You have to release the table to hold the datapad properly (your cuffs make it difficult), but the doctor has you sit there, legs hanging off the edge. She’s likely worried you’ll drop unconscious. You would, too. 

 

“Okay. So, my name is Harriet Armando. What’s your name?”  

 

Slowly, with quaking fingers, you slowly type out the name that fits you, that feels almost as right as your skin does. 

 

“Maine,” The data pad reads out to you in a mechanical masculine voice. Phantom pain starbursts from the base of your skull and you shake your head with a vengeance. Something about it hurts to hear,  _ hurts you _ . 

 

“Are you okay?” The medic places a hand on your arm. “What’s wrong?” She catches the datapad before you drop it, fingers curling into your palms as you press the heels to your forehead-  _ knock knock Agent Maine, who’s there- _ . One of the soldiers makes a motion, his boots scuffing against the dusty floor. The dust is stuck to your hands, it catches in the creases of your brow. 

 

You suck in air through your teeth, exhale through your teeth. 

 

“Maine?”

 

You force your arms to relax, taking the datapad back into your hands.  

 

You jab a finger at the settings symbol in the corner. The doctor watches, confused, as you pull up the voice settings and then go back to the keyboard.

 

“Are you okay?” 

 

“Yes,” you don’t elaborate. You don’t explain. 

 

“So… Maine, Is that a nickname? First name? Last name?”

 

Shake your head. That’s the only name you have, now. No matter how much you search the rotting recesses of your memory, you won’t find any name other than that. 

 

“Okay,” that seems to be the weirdest thing to her. “What happened to you, Maine?”

 

That’s a very broad question. You stare at her for a moment, expecting her to clarify. She clears her throat and continues, “Why were you out there in the jungle?” 

 

“Running.” 

 

“From what?”

 

“Crash,” you don’t know if these soldiers were friends with the man you strangled. You don’t know if these people are actually friendly, though they damn sure seem like it. 

 

“A ship crash?”

 

Nod.

 

“Whose prisoner were you?” 

 

“UNSC,” that seems to catch the doctor off guard. She must have not considered that a possibility. 

 

“Do you know where you are?” That is not where the question looked to be going. You prefer this, even as you shake your head ‘no.’

 

“You’re on Chorus. On the very edge of colonized space.”  

 

Oh. Outer colony. Insurrectionists suddenly seem very likely again. 

 

“UNSC here?”

 

“No,” she says simply, calm. “During the Great War, they pulled back. We’re an independent planet, now.” 

You are outside of UNSC jurisdiction, then. They can’t possibly find you here, can they?

 

“We’re not going to call for them.” She says. Maybe she read your face. Maybe she was guessing your sudden fear. “We can’t.”

 

“Can’t?”

 

“Long-distance communications don’t work. We can’t reach anywhere off-planet.” 

 

“Why?”

 

She shrugs. “Maybe the Feds’ve got the comms jammed. We don’t know. We don’t even have a working Slipspace-capable ship out here to go look.”

 

Oh. That’s not so great.

 

“Feds?”

 

“The Federal Army of Chorus.” The doctor doesn’t speak like she’s one of them. “We’ve been fighting them for years.”

 

“Rebels?”

 

“New Republic of Chorus, actually. You’re actually in our HQ right now.” She nods over your shoulder. “Mateus was the one who carried you in here.”

 

You glance over your shoulder. You wonder which soldier is Mateus. 

 

“Are you a soldier, Maine?”

 

You don’t think you’ve ever been asked that before. People just seemed to assume you were a soldier. Including you. 

 

Nod.

 

“Okay. I’m guessing you don’t have any allergies?”

 

“No allergies.” 

 

“Good. That makes treating you a lot easier. You don’t mind if we treat you, do you? We’re not too ready to drop you off into the middle of a warzone with a concussion and maybe a broken nose. We haven’t gotten past the initial examinations.” 

 

Right. You bruised your shoulder rolling off the table. 

 

“I don’t mind.” 

 

“Good,” the doctor probably couldn’t in good conscience allow you to walk away from her examining table. She looked over to the soldiers who looked ready to line up a succession of headshots from their short distance. 

 

Your brain would be pulped bone fragments, gray matter, blood, and bone on the metal. Easy to clean off.

 

“Hey, you lot, get out of here. I have a patient to care for.” The doctor scolded, shooing at the soldiers but not moving from the table. 

 

“Doc, with all due respect, I think it’d be wise-”

 

“Don’t tell me what’s  _ wise,  _ Chandler.” 

 

“Armando, he’s-”

 

“A poor, concussed, handcuffed bastard that probably couldn’t get very far if he wanted to.” A new voice cuts in, familiar, and the man in the angular black and orange armor appears in the doorway, turning all the soldiers’ heads. “So how ‘bout you all go grab something to eat and stop buggin’ the doc?” 

 

“Since when did you tell us what to do?” Felix shrugs. 

 

“I’ve been telling you guys what to do for a while. Doesn’t matter. But, the supply team just got back and there might be something that isn’t decade-old MREs, so-”

 

The examining room is empty within a blink. Felix leans against the doorway, taking up most of the space now with no one trying to pass by it.

 

“Hey, Felix.” The doctor murmurs, not sounding particularly excited.

 

“A thank you’d be nice.” 

 

“I’m sure if I threatened to throw a scalpel at them it’d get them out just as fast.” Her fingers curl around your jaw, tilting your face back to her as she focused on the blood caked into your hair, brushing the locks of tangled hair aside to get a better look. 

“Sure… Hey, do you want some help?”

 

“Since when did you get medical training?”

 

“I didn’t. But I see gigantor over here is still handcuffed.” There’s the jingling of what you realize may be lockpicking tools. The doctor glances at him before nodding her head. There’s the thunks of someone in power armor- not normal armor, like the soldiers you were just looking at.

 

Felix comes around to the other side of the examination table. He takes your cuffed hands into his and analyzes what kind of locking mechanism they could have.

 

“Ooh, high tech. This is the kind’a shit they slap on the big guys.” You don’t know if he’s looking at you. You guess he isn’t. He hasn’t taken off his helmet. “But I mean, you look like one of those supersoldier types-”

 

“Supersoldiers?” Armando asks, glancing at him. Felix pauses for a moment in his analysis. 

 

“Oh, yeah. That thing went public after you all went dark.” He resumes his analysis. “Damn, have I got some stories to tell you all. The Seconds’ll eat it up.”

 

“Can you please focus on picking that lock.”

 

“‘S what I’m doin’, doc.” 

 

“Right,” the doctor mutters, combing more of your hair back with her fingers, a weirdly soothing sensation along your aching scalp. It doesn’t trigger any memories. You like it. You have to strangle the sound that tries to come out when she stops, seemingly satisfied that she can get a good view at your head wound.

 

“So, what got you on the UNSC’s bad side?” 

 

“Felix-”

 

“C’mon, I’m curious. Defected? Shoot your dumbass CO in the face?” He suggests this like that’s what he did. Or fantasized of doing, perhaps. You feel no concern over the fact a possible CO-shooter is working on uncuffing your hands. 

 

“Felix!”

 

“Look, I’ve thought of it, you would’ve thought of it, I’m pretty sure every poor bastard that didn’t get crispy-fried on the front lines considered shooting their CO at  _ least  _ once.”

 

You can’t remember, so you can’t exactly verify the truth of Felix’s point. 

 

The cuffs come off with a mechanical click and Felix quietly whoops his success. “I am awesome!” He sing songs as he deposits the thing on the examination table while you flex your hands, trying to chase away the pins and needles feeling occupying the empty space of your fingertips.

 

You can hear the heavy thunk of his boots as he leaves the examination room, humming some pop song you don’t recognize. 

 

“Sorry about him. He’s a mercenary.”

The doc’s gloved hand flits over the edge of the bruise in your skull, lighting up a patch of nerves in pain that makes you wince. 

 

“Sorry. He got hired a couple years back. Ex-UNSC, like you. He’s an asshole, though.”

 

Your fumble for the datapad and tap out a question; “Not Chorus?” 

 

“Felix? No, he’s some inner-colony guy who showed up here a couple years ago.” She squints at your nose for a moment before reaching out and pressing her fingers to it. Pain sharply knives through the flesh to your nasal bone and the base of your forehead. You squint, grimacing, and the doctor quickly moves her hand away. 

 

It’s maybe five more minutes of being poked and analyzed for whatever injuries you could have (definitely a concussion and fractured nose) before someone else shows up. You think Felix, or maybe one of the soldiers that brought you back, but-

 

“General,” the doctor pulls away from you, hands at her sides, her voice full of respect. You turn, slowly as to not agitate your aching brain.      

A woman in armor, patched and chipped just like the other soldiers, stands in the doorway. Her helmet is tucked under her arm, giving you a view of her face. Dark skin, her thick black hair tied back in a knot of braids as thick as your thumb.   

 

“Felix told me about the new guy. I wanted to see for myself.” You inhale sharply through your nose. You smell sweat and the metal of the lockers and that ambiguously fruit-scented hair product Carolina uses- 

 

You inhale again and all you smell is rust, sweat, dust, and dry blood. The General walks over, her eyes keeping with yours despite the height difference. 

 

“I apologize for the impression my men may have left on you.” She extends her free hand, you have to extend your arm to answer the handshake. Your hand dwarfs hers, but she doesn’t seem to mind. “General Hine of the New Republic of Chorus. And you are?”

 

You fumble for the datapad and spell out, “Maine.” The General blinks at you, confused, before Armando helpfully supplies;

 

“He can’t speak, General.” 

 

“Oh,” she blinks again before continuing, “So, Felix told me you’re ex-UNSC?”

 

You can only nod. You don’t understand the fascination.

 

“Tell me, what do you know about Chorus?”

 

Shrug. You don’t know where it is, just a vague concept. 

 

“Okay. Are you aware of our situation?”

 

“Civil war?” you type out on the datapad. The General nods. 

 

“So you’ve been informed. I wanted to explain this to you, in case you wanted a trip out of here or somewhere nice to go. There isn’t any.”

 

“Don’t want a trip.” The General tilts her head. “Why do you fight?” The General stills, suddenly looks a little older, before she relaxes.

 

“That’s a long story. You sure you wanna hear it?”

 

“I like to fight with intel.” 

 

She stares at you. Really stares, as if she never expected you to suggest what you’re pretty sure you just suggested because you’re not getting off this goddamn planet, this planet in the middle of a civil war.

 

You never believed in fate, Maine. You believed humanity could make its way for anything. Make a way to survive space, to survive the Covenant, to survive each other, to survive. And to thrive. 

 

And you, Maine. You thrive in war.

 

So maybe fate has a dash of truth to it. 

 

"Okay," Hine says and pulls up a stool.

 

This is where you hear the story of Chorus (mining colony, descended from the people of Harvest). This is where you learn the horrors of civil war through the lines in General Hine’s face (shelled families, starvation, riots). This is where you make a decision. Concussed, tired, supposed to be fucking dead, dead like your friends, your fellow soldiers, fellow Freelancers, fellow AI- 

 

“I want to help.”

 

“What?”

 

“I want to help.”

 

“... I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but why?” 

 

“Because you need help. I want to help.” Really, Maine, it isn’t just that you want to help. You want to fix. Fix what you’ve done wrong, make up in some small way. Make up for the fact you aren’t dead, you haven’t stopped and ceased to exist after stopping so many others. “Let me help.”

 

She sucks in a breath, folds her arms. “Okay.”  

 

This is how you got here, Maine.

 

This is why you are on Chorus. 

 

And this is why you are fighting a war.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone is interested in Beta reading the next piece, which is already written and awaiting publishing, please hit me up!


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